Ben Stiller

WHAT YOU SAY There were some great movies nominated for this past season's Oscars, and the actors and actresses deserved well-intended accolades and praises. But as a diversion from severity, violence and language, I would prefer to purchase the DVD A Night at the Museum starring Ben Stiller, for an evening of fun and fantasy. I think Ben Stiller is a great actor, and he certainly proved his talent in this movie. Freda Garelick, Baltimore THE NEXT QUESTION Actor Terrence Howard stars in Pride, which opens today, as Jim Ellis, a Philadelphia swim coach who takes a team of nonswimmers and turns them into swimmers who win meets.

A lively satirical take on superheroes from "Batman" to "The Terminator," "Mystery Men" zips along like a live-action comic book, so full of sarcasm and in-joke humor that its inherent sweetness is easy to miss.The story of a bunch of bumbling wannabes who set out to save their home town, the film is an amusing, often hilarious paean to every Citizen Joe who ever dreamed of lifting a bus to save a child or stopping a crime with just a withering remark."Mystery Men," which is based on a group of characters from the "Flaming Carrot" comic book series created by Bob Burden, opens in Champion City, where a nursing home is being attacked by a gang of marauders.

"Permanent Midnight," based on writer Jerry Stahl's memoir of drug addiction in Hollywood, shows just how stupid smart people can be. More impressive, it also demonstrates Ben Stiller's ability to make a self-loathing jerk sympathetic.In director David Veloz's adaptation, Stiller plays the movie version of Stahl, who had great success writing scripts for TV shows including "Moonlighting" and "ALF" while he was strung out on enough illegal drugs to kill a Tyrannosaurus rex. We hear most of Jerry's bleak and darkly funny story as he tells it, from the other side of rehab, to an empathetic lover in a hotel room (the appealing Maria Bello)

The kings of gross-out comedy, brothers Peter and Bobby Farrelly, are back with a romantic romp about as sweet as they can make it -- between crude sexual jokes, flatulent humor, sadistic sight gags involving a yippy dog and comedy at the expense of the handicapped.Actually, "Something About Mary" doesn't poke fun at the handicapped so much as at the patronizing and hypocritical way many "abled" people deal with them. In fact, the Brothers Farrelly seem set on skewering every politically correct piety they can sight their prodigious squirt-gun on.But such subtextual subtleties are lost amid the utterly offensive, and often riotously funny, on-screen goings-on.

Are you ready for this? "Heavyweights" turns out to be about the night in Vienna in 1909 when Freud, Oswald Spengler, Gustav Klimt, Carl Jung and Egon Schiele all went to a strip bar together, got wildly drunk, and ended up in the hoosegow the next morning."

First-time director Ben Stiller, the son of comedians Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, understands the existential qualities of directing a movie about misdirected twentysomethings in a world run by baby boomers."

Sundays7 p.m.: "Great Scott" (new)p.m.: "The Ben Stiller Show" (new)8 p.m.: "In Living Color"8:30 p.m.: "Roc"9 p.m.: "Married . . . With Children"p.m.: "Herman's Head"10 p.m.: "Flying Blind" (new)10:30 p.m.: "Woops!" (new)Mondays8 p.m.: "Fox Night at the Movies"Tuesdays8 p.m.: "Class of '96" (new)p.m.: "Key West" (new)Wednesdays8 p.m.: "The Heights" (new)p.m.: "Melrose Place" (new)Thursdays8 p.m.: "The Simpsons"p.m.: "Martin" (new)9 p.m.: "Beverly Hills, 90210"Fridays8 p.m.: "America's Most Wanted"p.

"Roc" is going live. And Fox is going to seven nights and a virtual year-round schedule of prime-time shows geared to young viewers.Fox Broadcasting yesterday announced a fall schedule that includes 11 new programs and is easily the most daring of any broadcast network's. For example, not only did Fox renew the lowly rated "Roc" -- a sitcom about a Baltimore sanitation worker -- but announced that "Roc" will be broadcast live each week next season. It will be the first prime-time series to be broadcast live on a regular basis since the 1950s.

"Roc" is going live. And Fox is going to seven nights and a virtual year-round schedule of prime-time shows geared to young viewers.Fox Broadcasting yesterday announced a fall schedule that includes 11 new programs and is easily the most daring of any broadcast network's. For example, not only did Fox renew the lowly rated "Roc" -- a sitcom about a Baltimore sanitation worker -- but announced that "Roc" will be broadcast live each week next season. It will be the first prime-time series to be broadcast live on a regular basis since the 1950s.

Sundays7 p.m.: "Great Scott" (new)7:30 p.m.: "The Ben Stiller Show" (new)8 p.m.: "In Living Color"8:30 p.m.: "Roc"9 p.m.: "Married . . . With Children"9:30 p.m.: "Herman's Head"10 p.m.: "Flying Blind" (new)10:30 p.m.: "Woops!" (new)Mondays8 p.m.: "Fox Night at the Movies"Tuesdays8 p.m.: "Class of '96" (new)9 p.m.: "Key West" (new)Wednesdays8 p.m.: "The Heights" (new)9 p.m.: "Melrose Place" (new)Thursdays8 p.m.: "The Simpsons"8:30 p.m.: "Martin" (new)9 p.m.: "Beverly Hills, 90210"Fridays8 p.m.: "America's Most Wanted"9 p.m.: "Sightings"9:30 p.m.: "Likely Suspects" (new)

The Soloist *** ( 3 STARS) Jamie Foxx steals the show as a former Juilliard student whose tenuous mental state relegates him to the mean streets that house L.A.'s homeless. Robert Downey Jr. is the L.A. Times columnist who first exploits, then grudgingly befriends, him. The movie suffers by trying to illuminate, perhaps, too many of society's ills. But hey, at least it tries. Opening next Friday Dance Flick: (Paramount Pictures) The creators of the Scary Movie franchise return to spoof song-and-dance movies like High School Musical.

Dodgeball 5:30 p.m. [FX] No, it's not coverage of some elementary school recess. It's the movie featuring Vince Vaughn in a typically Vaughnian role and Ben Stiller (left) in one of his "wacky" ones. The cast also features Curtis Armstrong, the beloved "Booger" from the Revenge of the Nerds movies.

Four Christmases *** 1/2 ( 3 1/2 Stars) $16.8 million $69.4 million 2 1/2 weeks Rated: PG-13 Running time: 82 minutes What it's about: After years of leaving the country for Christmas, a couple are forced to spend the holiday with their families. : Our take: Vince Vaughn, as one-half of the trapped couple, is his usual boarish self, but Reese Witherspoon (above) explores her lighter side to great effect. as the other half. Twilight ** ( 2 STARS) $13 million $138.4 million 3 weeks Rated: PG-13 Running time: 121 minutes What it's about: Good-guy vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson, above)

Australia What it's about : With a can-do Aussie spirit, English aristocrat Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman, above) and her right-hand man and lover, the Drover, end up rescuing and running the ranch her murdered husband left her. Rated: PG-13 The scoop : Despite the fresh environments, this film is made up of bits and pieces of other movies, including The Wizard of Oz, Gone With the Wind, Casablanca, and, yes, Cattle Queen of Montana; and by the...

Australia What it's about : With a can-do Aussie spirit, English aristocrat Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman, above) and her right-hand man and lover, the Drover, end up rescuing and running the ranch her murdered husband left her. Rated: PG-13 The scoop : Despite the fresh environments, this film is made up of bits and pieces of other movies, including The Wizard of Oz, Gone With the Wind, Casablanca, and, yes, Cattle Queen of Montana; and by the...

Quantum of Solace ** 1/2 ( 2 1/2 STARS) $67.5 million $67.5 million 1 week Rated: PG-13 Running time: 106 minutes What it's about: 007 avenges the death of his true love while obliterating a crooked international green-industry syndicate. Our take: Daniel Craig (above), the most Byronic of all James Bonds, manages the astonishing task of rooting an outlandish yet sober-sided movie in reality and bringing it an air of wicked amusement, too. Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa *** 1/2 ( 3 1/2 STARS)

As he showed in his short-lived comedy-sketch TV series, Ben Stiller has a gift for crafting show-biz lampoons that explode the boundaries between burlesque and satire, low and high culture, clowning and parody. One of the funniest things ever put on television was the skit he called "Woody Allen's Bride of Frankenstein," a take-off on Husbands and Wives with a cast of characters that included Frankenstein's monster and the Mummy. It slashed through Allen's psychodrama with a simple, brilliant stroke: Allen's characters often acted monstrously; in Stiller's parody, they were monsters.

The new Ben Stiller vehicle The Heartbreak Kid has a killer "high concept" - a husband falls in love with another woman while still on his honeymoon. It's worked twice before, brilliantly, both in its original form as a brisk, sardonic Bruce Jay Friedman short story (called "A Change of Plan") and as an emotionally booby-trapped Elaine May movie, also called The Heartbreak Kid, from 1972. This new version, directed by the Farrelly brothers (There's Something About Mary) and adapted by a backcourt of screenwriters from the '72 screenplay (by Neil Simon)

WHAT YOU SAY There were some great movies nominated for this past season's Oscars, and the actors and actresses deserved well-intended accolades and praises. But as a diversion from severity, violence and language, I would prefer to purchase the DVD A Night at the Museum starring Ben Stiller, for an evening of fun and fantasy. I think Ben Stiller is a great actor, and he certainly proved his talent in this movie. Freda Garelick, Baltimore THE NEXT QUESTION Actor Terrence Howard stars in Pride, which opens today, as Jim Ellis, a Philadelphia swim coach who takes a team of nonswimmers and turns them into swimmers who win meets.

Jermaine Hash insists he doesn't mind being alone inside a closed museum all night. Neither does Allen Cummings, but he allows that, "You do hear sounds in here." "Here" is the Inner Harbor's Maryland Science Center. It's well past midnight on a recent weekday evening, and the two men are describing what it's like to hold one of Baltimore's eeriest jobs: night watchman in an empty, cavernous museum. After all, the night watchmen at New York's Museum of Natural History have to watch over bounding dinosaurs, talking statues, living-history dioramas and restless mummies.